Hi! It's mainly a summary of me trying to learn game dev and reflection on current tools, also Scratch kinda inspired the "blocky declarative" style because we hope kids can make games with kaboom with "real code" just after they completed learning Scratch. Also a lot of softwares I like e.g love2d, PICO8, sokol, Amulet, Klik & Play
Klik n Play was such a fascinating programming model. I can't think of many places with... Example-based programming? It was such a curious paradigm, in retrospect.
They didn’t create it, this was made by the team at repl.it. In case a mod sees this, it would be great to be able to provide a reason for flagging a submission
I minted an NFT, a non fungible token, to learn more about what they are, how they function, and if it's worth the time, effort, and cost(around $100 worth of ethereum) of minting them. It's up for auction on Rarible.com
If this experiment turns a profit, I'll mint some more while simultaneously questioning why anyone would buy ownership of a pixel art heart. If it fails to turn a profit, I'll consider the cost of the experiment a small price to pay to confirm that the market, and therefore the world, still make sense, and that we haven't completely lost the plot, jumped the shark, and/or entered the strangest timeline.
There are 3 possible scenarios related to viruses and humanity on Earth.
1) Normalcy: People live their lives as they have for thousands of years, and some percentage of people die from any number of viruses, but never enough to permanently trigger one of the other scenarios.
2) Extraterran: Humanity can no longer survive one or more of the viruses on Earth. Those of us who continue to live here must do so as if it were a foreign planet filled pathogens that will surely kill us, because they do.
3) Extinction: Humanity is ended by one or more viruses.
Of these 3 possible scenarios, the 1st one seems more likely than the others, and is what we should aim for before being forced into the 2nd one to avoid the 3rd. Right now we are living somewhere between the 1st and 2nd, and my intuition tells me that all our efforts related to coronaviruses, regardless of the strain, won't be able to save those whom are genetically unlucky enough to be predisposed to die from them forever. They will mutate, and eventually infect everyone, not unlike the common cold, and humanity will move on having lost somewhere between 1% and 10% of it's population, just as it would have had no curtailing measures been taken or vaccines developed at all; no different than it has been through the vast majority of our time on earth. While a higher population and the ease of global travel does mean that the virus side of the immunological arms race is boosted, all that does is raise the bar for ours. Either we'll pass, or we wont. Finally, while the deaths that have happened, and the future deaths that are likely to happen, on our path back to normalcy are certainly tragic: they have been, and will be, part and parcel of existing as organic beings living on a wild world. We cannot expect to only exist in nature when it is convenient for us. As long as we remain natural beings, we must accept that some of us will be eaten.
What does burning down your buildings every so often achieve? It ensures the skills of building are passed down from generation to generation, that the people remain well practiced in those skills, creates the conditions for the iterative improvement of those practices, and enforces a detachment from the results of the practice of building in favor of an attachment to the practice itself, the latter of which seems like a much more valuable asset to possess, considering the life-expectancy of these buildings. What does fire do on a symbolic level? It hardens, cleanses, purifies, and refines. Perhaps they did this every time the leadership changed, so the success or failure of the tribe or settlement under the new leader/chieftain could not be blamed on nor attributed to the previous one. A clean slate for each administration, so to speak.
On another note, if these structures are essentially what the guy from the neolithic technology youtube channel gets up to, then maybe they just did it for fun. Guy looks like he's having the time of his life playing in the mud.
> What does burning down your buildings every so often achieve? It ensures the skills of building are passed down from generation to generation, that the people remain well practiced in those skills
This is unconvincing. In most cultures, most of the time, people manage to pass down building skills without destroying everything they've built before.
Another comment here referenced the Ise Grand Shrine [0], so that is what I bet the OP is referring to. I pose this, religion isn't only about spiritual beliefs, it encompasses rituals, culture, and history. Knowledge transfer is a major part of continuing a religious culture, whether it be through studying of scripts or preaching. So, just because it is religious based doesn't exclude it from also being about transferring of knowledge.
The link provided shows that it is due to the religious belief of rebirth, the tradesmen themselves practice their skills continually, so the theory still doesn't map for me. Moreso if we apply Occam's razor: there's no evidence the Japanese practice is for skill transfer yet it's being used to promote that premise for something else.
Religion is just a specific way of encoding useful lessons into oral/written tradition. So it could well be that keeping the trade alive was the original reason but it became a religious doctrine so as not to be violated.
This is a seemingly compelling explanation, but I see no reason why it would actually be true.
It seems to me like it treats people as lacking the degree of intelligence and foresight needed to figure out that it's a good idea to pass building techniques along. As if back in the day people were only capable of understanding things if they were framed in a religious or supernatural way.
I just don't think people a couple of thousand years ago were so cognitively different from us. Not to mention that there's still overwhelming evidence of knowledge being passed down for non-religious purposes throughout history.
> It seems to me like it treats people as lacking the degree of intelligence and foresight needed to figure out that it's a good idea to pass building techniques along. As if back in the day people were only capable of understanding things if they were framed in a religious or supernatural way.
I think this speaks to your own prejudice against religion based on how Christianity is treated in the US. Religion isn't predominantly about supernaturality, it's about what works. Supernatural explanations of why it works almost don't matter, if it works.
Let me give an example. Christian morality seems to be to largely be about stabilising society. "Turn the other cheek" prevents cycles of revenge, for example. Does it matter if that's the case because you understand cycles of revenge and how they lead to more harm than the original offence, or because your priest told you that's the right thing to do? It would be ideal if everyone just understood these precepts from logic, but I don't see any structures for disseminating logical behaviour to the broad masses today either.
People thousands of years ago are the same people as us. I see plenty of truth in religion and I see plenty of falsehood in modern, supposedly "rational" modalities. I don't think the balance of how clear-thinking we are has changed at all.
I actually didn't mean to be dismissive of religion. It's just that in general I don't think you need religious or any other indirect justifications for the pretty straight-forward idea that it's good to pass building techniques along.
> Christian morality seems to be to largely be about stabilising society. "Turn the other cheek" prevents cycles of revenge, for example.
Again, I think you might be mistaking the effect for the cause. While it may be true that applying the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount might lead to social stability, I don't think that's what Jesus intended exactly. I don't think he was doing social engineering, rather that he was really trying to convey his ideas of what a right and moral life would be. The fact that leading good lives as individuals leads to better societies is a fortunate corollary, not the main purpose.
Incidentally, if you think about it honestly, it's quite clear that Christianity didn't actually lead to particularly nice societies, once it became the politically dominant religion.
For the record I also need to mention I'm not American and was raised Christian (although I don't consider myself one anymore).
> Again, I think you might be mistaking the effect for the cause. While it may be true that applying the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount might lead to social stability, I don't think that's what Jesus intended exactly. I don't think he was doing social engineering, rather that he was really trying to convey his ideas of what a right and moral life would be. The fact that leading good lives as individuals leads to better societies is a fortunate corollary, not the main purpose.
Then what is the purpose of leading a good life? In my mind, morality is precisely in order to stabilise society. I know we don't talk about it in those terms, but then we never really talk about the purpose behind good and evil. It's just "doing this is good, doing this is bad".
> Incidentally, if you think about it honestly, it's quite clear that Christianity didn't actually lead to particularly nice societies, once it became the politically dominant religion.
Compared to what? Today? Possibly not no (though I think we fail to acknowledge how much we lost in our transition to secularity), but compared to what came before Christianity was pretty great, as I understand. To be honest I lay a lot of the historical nastiness of Christianity at the feet of the Church rather than the teachings of Christ too, after all power does corrupt.
> For the record I also need to mention I'm not American and was raised Christian (although I don't consider myself one anymore).
I'm not either. But I do see nerd-culture (or tech-culture or whatever) as being broadly very dismissive of the value of religion, and generally having no understanding of it either. Funnily enough I was raised Atheist but am now a somewhat-practicing Buddhist.
> Then what is the purpose of leading a good life? In my mind, morality is precisely in order to stabilise society.
The way I see it morality is an intrinsic human ability. This is not to say that all people are moral, but that all people, if they develop in a normal, stable environment, will naturally develop a certain morality that is actually not that different from one person to another. In this view morality doesn't really need to be taught and enforced by authority. Leading a good life is therefore the natural thing that people do.
> we fail to acknowledge how much we lost in our transition to secularity
I tend to agree, although for me what was lost with secularization is not so much morality, but important social institutions that fostered collaboration, charity, mutual understanding. Even when it's not lost, religion can be deeply perverted by the modern capitalist society - something like prosperity theology is an abomination to me.
> compared to what came before Christianity was pretty great
I recommend The Darkening Age[1] for a sense of just how destructive early Christianity was.
> I do see nerd-culture (or tech-culture or whatever) as being broadly very dismissive of the value of religion, and generally having no understanding of it either
Here I also tend to agree, particularly when the dismissal of religion is tied in with scientism and perhaps even classism.
> The way I see it morality is an intrinsic human ability. This is not to say that all people are moral, but that all people, if they develop in a normal, stable environment, will naturally develop a certain morality that is actually not that different from one person to another. In this view morality doesn't really need to be taught and enforced by authority. Leading a good life is therefore the natural thing that people do.
I actually strongly disagree with this. I think there are some moral values (obvious ones being like "don't murder your family/friends") (but then why would you, they are of practical value to most people) but if you look at, for example the Old Testament there's tons of murdering of other groups being approved by God. So clearly, moral values can change over time. Even across cultures you can see behaviours that one culture finds deeply offensive and the other is the norm. The stoning of women in the Middle East comes to mind. I believe this moral core of right/wrong is extremely cultural, not innately human.
> I tend to agree, although for me what was lost with secularization is not so much morality, but important social institutions that fostered collaboration, charity, mutual understanding. Even when it's not lost, religion can be deeply perverted by the modern capitalist society - something like prosperity theology is an abomination to me.
I think a central morality is something we've lost. So we're getting moral drift where cultural norms splinter into different factions of morality. Clearly, for example, cancel culture is not in line with redemption morality, which is a deeply Christian ideal.
Prosperity theology is messed up though. America's weird in how it seems to have adopted capitalism as a replacement or supplement to culture in some areas, rather than as a separate social concept.
> I recommend The Darkening Age[1] for a sense of just how destructive early Christianity was.
I mean we all know that the Church in the Middle Ages was oppressive, I don't disagree with you there. Establishments seem to swing between good and bad.
> Here I also tend to agree, particularly when the dismissal of religion is tied in with scientism and perhaps even classism.
Yeah scientism gets my goat. HN being one of the worst culprits. I hated it before I adopted idealist metaphysics but now it's even worse because I'm more aware of the limits of both the idealised and in-reality scientific process than ever.
Americans don't talk about classism. Which is rather strange as they're very excited to talk about any other kind of -ism, some of which are deeply entwined with classism.
I could see the opposite of that possibly arising, e.g. doing something irrational like creating a training event every 2 decades, due to belief - but the inverse makes no sense to me, what's the advantage to a society to renewing skills at 20 year cliff-edges vs. continual development? Makes less sense still in the context of Japanese kingdoms, the kingdom choosing to continually propagate skills would win.
Because skills aren't always generalisable. For the Ido shine, for example, there's a specific building skillset they use for building temples. New temples aren't built often enough to keep those skills sharp.
> training
Training doesn't impart skills unless the theoretical knowledge is actually used. What better way to use it than to build a temple?
I believe that in the modern world, specialization is more common, where ancient skills might have been more generalized.
So comparing to the modern world, I know of one relative in the industry of building homes, but even that person has never "built" their own home, and none of my relatives have bought a newly built home. In other words, in our family the skill of building home is very barely there. We'd likely have to hire out. If, instead, when my parents bought the house I grew up in from my great grandparents, they'd torn it down and built a new one, then the skill would have only skipped one generation, but continue to be exercised within our family.
Imagine if computer engineers have a religion of burning down and rebuilding the entire computer architecture every 20 years, hardware and software, from scratch. Everything will be cleaner, and the problem raised by Jonathan Blow [0] can be addressed too (it's basically: modern system has low understandably & maintainability, everything is extremely complex, and only a few people in the world can understand systems at each low-level component, it only takes a moderate social disruption for the entire digital civilization to collapse").
There is an interesting discussion going on in the recent Microsoft Exchange hack thread about firm's periodically rebuilding their IT infrastructures to protect against malware that shows some convergent thinking that might interest you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26367534
I like your idea. What do you think would be the first step to getting there?
I have a client in the controls systems space, a systems integrator that helps municipalities update the systems that keep the water running, and one concern that occurred to me while investigating their business requirements is how the systems they work on are becoming less and less able to recover from certain attacks as the components that make them work become purely digital and electronically controlled. Perhaps we should begin engraving the contents of wikipedia on clay tablets, just in case.
I concur with your suspicion. A quick google of smart fridge startups yields this post as its 5th result.I'll list what my search returned.
1)Ovie.life, which doesn't seem to have launched yet.
2)Karma.life, which came up in an article about it, rather than the website proper, though the .life tld seems like an interesting trend.
3)Whisk.com, which appears to be the most alive, so far, of the companies I found in this space.
4)Brezzl.com, which makes a fridge cam to turn your dumb fridge smart. Because people want smart fridges without spending smart fridge money, ostensibly.
5)ByteFoods.co, which looks a reinvented version of those random food item vending machines. I can't tell if employees pay per item or the client firm pays to keep it stocked, but seems like an interesting perk to have if the latter.
And that's it for the first page of results.
Observations:
1)It seems like every major fridge manufacturer now has a smart fridge offering that already does much of what a pure smart fridge startup would do.
2)Most of the results returned by this query were smart fridge startup adjacent, if I had to rigorously categorize them.
3)Whisk is the only one I think I've heard of, but I'm not sure what it does.
4)I have a wife that does the shopping. Aside from Covid concerns this past year, I wouldn't want to be the one to tell her I've solved the "problem" of her having a recurring task to do that gets her out of the house a few times a week and brings real value to our family, and all with a single click for the low cost $9.99 per month, no less. She might like the extra free time, but I doubt it would be in our combined best interest to have that bit of control and impact taken away from her "for her convenience". Call me crazy, but I'd go as far to say she likes it. She's a homemaker, so I'm assuming a more directly income generating career oriented person would feel differently, especially if the food shopping we're "their task" in a given relationship, unless their partner handled all the home maintenance and yardwork such that nutrient acquisition being left to the subject in question seemed fair, though in our case, Granddad does those things (enjoying his retirement, he says), making the 90 hours a week I spend running my businesses darn enjoyable, I have to say. I'm curious to hear from others if they, or their partners (whether directly queried or as matter of perception) enjoy, or seem to enjoy stopping/going out for groceries (let's assume in the pre-covid times, for argument's sake).
I think my final observation above is what makes smart fridge startups DOA. They're messing with the bread and butter of a demographic that still, despite rapidly a-changing times, make up the vast majority of the bread-spenders, when it comes to nutrients, at least. That might be ill-advised. I who knows. It's not my wheelhouse.
I think I'll wait for a replicator, a la star trek, to hit the local distribution center before I start that conversation with Mrs. Mobley, anyway. I choose life.
I've been working heavily in what I've dubbed the POWERStack for the past 13 months for a consulting client. Front end = power apps, back end = power automate + some cloud powershell (azure automation runbooks), database = sharepoint lists, sql (for initializing/iterating on complex lists) = local powershell.
As for Power Fx, in one particularly fun PowerAutomate flow I crafted for them, I wrote the following one liner to display a "percent complete" value for a given employee with regards to trainings they'd taken vs. trainings they were expected to have taken for OSHA compliance purposes. Parsing it is left as an exercise for the reader:
Overall, I rate the POWERStack 8/10. It's not perfect, but it's fairly robust, not too difficult to reason about, and there are more than enough enterprise clients married to Microsoft to keep me in business for the foreseeable future. My only requests are to let me code Power Apps and Power Automate Flows fully in code-behind. I get that they're low-code tools by design, but in practice, they make things more difficult than they need to be for those of us who are quite happy to live in code, and I'd like to be able to build tools for automating the process for updating/adding functionalities to existing powerapps for those stakeholders that are on the absolutely-not-a-single-line-of-code-ever end of the development skill tree. Otherwise my business (in the Microsoft space) will remain bottlenecked by my time, and I'll have to dig elsewhere for my "set it and forget it" income stream.
If you need help building things with these tools/in this environment, feel free to reach out.
Your assertion that DNA is spaghetti code seems short sighted while the inner-workings of structures, such as human brains, which it can generate remain to be fully understood. There is more to learn. What you deem to be spaghetti may be the most efficient way to make one piece of code perform well under broad spectrum of conditions.
